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If you ask a Sprint employee whether they'll offer the iPhone, don't expect a straight answer – the company has told their staff to clam up if asked.

So says an purported "internal memo" snagged by the Sprint fanboi website, SprintFeed.

The memo – if it's real, that is – was prompted by a Wall Street Journal report last week which said that the iPhone 5 would join Sprint's lineup in "mid-October", making the US's third-largest mobile provider the third provider to offer the iPhone in the States, after AT&T and Verizon.

The memo – entitled "Action Required: Do Not Speculate about Sprint Getting the iPhone" – cites the WSJ report and instructs All Dealers: "If you are asked a direct question by a customer about Sprint getting the iPhone, you can simply say, 'Yes, I saw a few of those reports. I don't have any information to share'."

This "mum's the word" policy applies not only when speaking to customers, but also when an employee is "just talking to friends or family members."

If a pressed further, the memo suggests that the employee direct inquisitive souls to Sprint's Newsroom webpage.

We confess to not being intimately familiar with Sprint's policies regarding product confidentiality, but the practice of declining to provide either a "yes" or "no" – or, for that matter, a "possibly", "maybe", "perhaps", "conceivably", or, feeling literary, "perchance" or "peradventure" – fits right in with Apple's cult of secrecy.